Vending machines are well known devices employed at various locations to store and dispense a vast array of merchandise, including beverages, snacks, video tapes and children's toys, in response to a customer request and appropriate payment. Vending machines provide numerous benefits to customers and operators alike. Vending machines typically provide customers with the convenience of self-service and twenty four-hour access. Likewise, operators benefit from the ability of vending machines to make automated sales of merchandise to customers, often at unconventional locations and times of day, without substantial labor costs.
Although the basic advantages of vending machines are significant and well known, prior art vending machines have several significant disadvantages when compared to traditional retail merchandising, particularly relating to inventory control and pricing. A number of solutions have been proposed or suggested to address vending machine inventory control and pricing problems, including methods for determining what products are the best sellers, and the appropriate times and quantities for re-stocking vending machine items. The solutions include methods and systems that enable vending machine operators to remotely monitor inventory and remotely retrieve sales data.
The aforementioned solutions generally attempt to solve inventory problems by allowing operators to monitor and analyze raw sales data. Once the operators have analyzed the available sales data to make pricing decisions, however, the operators must then manually ratify and implement the decisions. In addition to being time consuming and burdensome, such manual processes are largely arbitrary and are not dynamically responsive to real-time market pressures. Furthermore, the implementation of any resulting price changes are delayed until the operator analyzes the raw supply and demand data, arrives at a pricing decision, and ultimately posts the pricing decision.
Accordingly, the current methods of implementing new pricing decisions are inconsistent with the fundamental benefits of automated merchandising afforded by vending machines. Pricing decisions in a vending machine operation cannot currently be made as easily as they may be, for example, in the retail environment where humans are physically present to monitor supply and demand and adjust prices accordingly.
A number of vending machine innovations have eased the management burden of vending machines by using existing network technology to interconnect vending machines. Such networking allows vending machine operators to remotely access inventory data in order to make re-stocking and marketing decisions. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,412,292, to Sedam et al., entitled "System for the Remote Monitoring of Vending Machines," (hereinafter, the "'292 Patent") discloses a system for remote monitoring of vending machines and for communicating conditions at the remote vending machine to a central controller. The system disclosed in the '292 Patent aids in inventory control and route planning for the supply and maintenance of the vending machines. In addition, the Vendview vending machine management product, commercially available from Skywire Corp. of Memphis, Tenn., is a remote vending machine monitoring system that provides vending operators with actual sales figures, the amount of cash that was collected by the vending machine since it was last serviced, and a notification of alarm conditions, such as restocking and service requirements. Again, the implementation of any resulting price changes with these innovations are delayed until the operator analyzes the available data, arrives at a pricing decision, and ultimately posts the pricing decision.
The parent application to the present application discloses a "Method and Apparatus For Dynamically Managing Vending Machine Inventory Prices" that enables the automatic price adjustment of vending machine items in an efficient manner, with respect to real-time determinations of sales and market data. However, if the price adjustment is determined to be successful for a given vending machine, there is currently no efficient way to propagate that price to similar vending machines with similar products.
As apparent from the above deficiencies with conventional vending machine systems, a need exists for a method and apparatus that dynamically and automatically tests, monitors and manages the pricing and other sales information associated with products sold by vending machines. A further need exists for a method and apparatus that initially adjusts and evaluates the price or other sales information associated with a product at one or more vending machines in a first group, and then progressively expands the new price or other sales information to one or more additional vending machines, upon verification of a successful change.